I read The Game not long after it came out. It’s a fun, crazy, bizarre story about the world of pick-up artists. It’s not really about how to pick up women, but about the loose collection of losers who charge other losers a high price to share their secrets. Neil doesn’t really fit in with these guys, but he does end up getting pretty good at getting women’s phone numbers. He doesn’t seem too interested in calling most of them though.
In The Truth, we find Neil a few years later. He’s a sadder and wiser fellow now. He realizes that it’s wrong to want to have sex with every woman he meets. But this doesn’t stop him from fantasizing about every woman he sees anyway.
He has a problem, so he does what any rich person does-he goes into Rehab.
In Rehab he learns that none of his actions are really his fault–wait for it–it’s his parent’s fault. At first, he’s a bit skeptical of it all. He’s a logical fellow and likes to think deep thoughts, so he isn’t a fan of the notion that he isn’t in charge of his own life. But as he works through the sessions in Rehab, he has a breakthrough. Yeah, it is all his parent’s fault. He cries and cries and hopes that he is now cured of his sexual addictions.
Then a bit of time passes and our old Neil steps forward. Forget about all this monogamy crap, he wants something else. He wants a world like the one he sees in porn movies. A place where the men are all hard, the women are all willing, and the orgasms last for hours.
But Neil isn’t cut from the same cloth as Brigham Young and things don’t go as he had hoped. He starts off by asking three random fuck buddies to move in with him, and then wants to go to sex parties once they do. I’m an old fashioned kind of guy, once I had three willing women at home, I might not be so interested in going to sex clubs. Neil can’t see the problem. He’s shocked when the women in his harem want some one on one time with him.
As with all Hero’s Journeys, Neil has to leave his normal world, meet up with a few gurus, wandering alone in the wilderness, and dies before he can be reborn.
The Truth was a fun book, but it took itself a little too serious at times, just as The Game did. Yes, it was all his parent’s fault, but he was man enough to heal his inner child and live happily ever after.
At least until the next book…
